My quickly jotted thoughts about all rounder, jack of all trades

Post date: Apr 19, 2016 3:45:27 AM

• Am I a Full Stack Developer / Administrator / Business Guy. It also means being jack of all trades. But can buy, build, setup, configure, develop, run, manage a whole system and business processes and customer support, everything alone from scratch. It requires a lot of studying all the time. But I think it's worth of it. Only thing limiting these activities is time. Some of the Full Stack Developer articles seem to think that there are no hardware, networks, data centers and they also forget that there are end user, customer support, usability issues, end user process flows, agreements, and taking care of the end user experience etc. It's not enough if you know how to boot up operating system, install 'stack' and then write node.js. There's much more there on both ends. Also you might need company, usually a good idea, as well as agreements with customers. And customer support, etc. I've noticed that some developers are extremely bad with networks, hardware or customer support. Those are the true of Full Stack. Yet I haven't gone yet in hardware design, sigh. I'm sure there are hackers out there who think buying a server or server components is cheating and not true Full Stack. Can you be a full stack guy if you can't fill well the business model canvas of the business you're running? I've got a few friends who also fill this whole scope. Usually running small technology / software companies with a max of handful of employees. They can do everything required to run a business with that small staff or alone.
• So if you're running a successful App / Web Business without using too much outsourced resources, and just a few persons then you're probably pretty much full stack person, taking care of everything that business needs to run.
• Full stack persons might not be actually valued by larger companies to full extent, but startups and new internal projects in larger companies with limited resources actually do require full stack people. If you get team for everything mentioned here, your funding is going to burn fast and runway is going to be pretty short.
• Good thing about full stack guys is that they do understand everything from the beginning to the end, the full stack. That can help enormously when trouble shooting or providing customer care. All that silly what did they mean, or how does it work, stuff goes away. Which can get to extremely ridiculous levels with some layered teams.

I've written this post a long time ago. But reading the Rework reminded me about this, and now it's here. I think I'm agreeing pretty much with the lines they did setup. So this post was written before reading the book.